IndyCar's young guns make their mark in 2021

Álex Palou looked like a sitting duck. The IndyCar Series world had been shocked when Chip Ganassi Racing hired Palou after the little-known Spaniard’s nondescript rookie season in 2020. Yet two weeks after turning 24, Palou qualified third during the season-opening Grand Prix of Alabama and controlled the race with a masterful blend of speed and fuel conversation strategy.

Now, with the laps ticking down at Barber Motorsports Park, Palou was being hounded by past IndyCar champ Will Power, who still had plenty of push-to-pass boost in the bank, and right behind Power was six-time champ Scott Dixon. Further complicating matters, Palou was being held up by slower drivers who were determined to remain on the lead lap.

Inside the cockpit, Palou’s heart rate spiked. “Even if you are P1 on the last lap, there are so many things that can happen to ruin your race,” he says. “I was convinced that we were doing a good job, but until the chequered flag was down, I never believed that we were going to win that race.”

Believe it. Palou held Power off by 0.416sec. “Chequered flag, baby,” Ganassi Racing general manager Mike Hull said over the radio. “You are an IndyCar winner.”

With this victory, Palou heralded a new paradigm that flips the cynical adage ‘old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance’ on its head. With the season almost complete, the biggest news in IndyCar has been the sustained excellence of a group of young drivers who could be known collectively as the Fab Four – Palou, 22-year-old Pato O’Ward, 21-year-old Colton Herta and Rinus VeeKay, who has just turned 21.

In recent years, IndyCar has been dominated by grizzled veterans like Dixon (age 41), Power (40) and Simon Pagenaud (37), plus the next generation – Josef Newgarden, Alexander Rossi and Graham Rahal, et al – who are pushing 30 or already there. But one week after Palou’s win at Barber, Herta went flag to flag at St Petersburg. A week after that, in the second race of the doubleheader at Texas Motor Speedway, O’Ward scored his maiden victory. The next event, on the road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, produced another first-time winner in VeeKay. Going into the summer break, the Fab Four improbably stood at positions 1-2-7-8 in the title hunt.

“Newgarden, Will Power, Scott Dixon – these guys are perennial favourites because they’ve still got tons of speed, and they’ve got experience on their side,” says Bryan Herta, Colton’s father and himself a four-time IndyCar winner. “But these young guys are coming in and rattling cages. Is it a changing of the guard or are the older guys going to be able to respond to the challenge?”

“In recent years, IndyCar has been dominated by grizzled vererans”

The young guns all arrived on the doorstep of Beatles-like stardom by different roads. Colton Herta is the best known because of his name, because of his success and because he’s been on the IndyCar scene for so long. His parents took him to the Long Beach Grand Prix, where his father was racing, when he was only three weeks old, and racetracks have been his favourite place to hang out all his life.

“Ever since I can remember, when I was three or four years old, I always wanted to drive race cars,” he says. “I started testing go-karts when I was five, and I was racing when I was six. I never really saw it as a profession. I looked at it as something that was really fun to do.”

Herta spent two successful seasons in Europe – often duelling with then Carlin team-mate Lando Norris in British Formula 3 and 4 – before returning to the States. After two strong years in Indy Lights, he graduated to IndyCar. At Circuit of the Americas in 2019, in his third race in the series, he became the youngest winner in IndyCar history. At the time, he barely looked old enough to take a date to the high school prom.

O’Ward has been the most spectacular of the quartet, but also the unluckiest. Born in Mexico and schooled in Texas, he’s got the fastest hands this side of a Wild West gunslinger. At 17, he was the youngest-ever winner in the PC class at Daytona and Sebring, then decisively beat Herta to win the Indy Lights championship in 2018. This earned him a slot on the Red Bull Junior team, with the expectation of moving to Formula 1 in 2020. But after racing briefly in Japan – against Palou – there was a problem with his Superlicence, and he returned home to the States.

Plans to move up to IndyCar were scuppered when his sponsorship fell through, and Herta got the ride instead. But O’Ward was hired by the newly formed Arrow McLaren SP operation in 2020, and he rewarded the team with four podiums, fourth place in the year-end standings and a highlight reel of in-car footage featuring a series of implausible saves. O’Ward’s convincing win this year at Texas guaranteed him a test in a McLaren F1 car. “See you in Abu Dhabi later this year!” McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown tweeted moments after the race.

“Across the globe teenagers are flooding into junior series”

Palou is the most battle-tested, globally, and probably the smoothest driver of the up-and-comers. His race log includes GP3, Formula 3, Formula 2 and Super GT and Super Formula in Japan. He was pleasantly surprised when Honda arranged an IndyCar test at Mid-Ohio with Dale Coyne Racing, and he was thrilled when his performance led to a full-time gig in 2020. Although his results were lacklustre, he showed enough speed to inspire Ganassi to hire him for 2021.

This year, he has barely put a foot wrong, and his second win of the season, at Road America, vaulted him to the top of the points standings. But the Indy 500 was the race that got away; he was passed by Hélio Castroneves with two laps to go and finished second by a scant 0.4928sec. “We had the fastest car,” Palou says. “But I had never led an oval race before, and I didn’t manage the traffic as well as I could have. I was figuring things out while I was racing.”

VeeKay – real name: van Kalmthout – has been the wild card. The son of a Dutch car dealer who raced in the Formula Ford Festival against Jenson Button and Danica Patrick, VeeKay set his sights on IndyCar after he was discovered by Simon Pagenaud at a kart race. He quickly worked his way up the ‘Road to Indy’ ladder in the States and landed a ride with Ed Carpenter Racing for the 2020 season.

His first race, at Texas, was an everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong nightmare. VeeKay crashed during practice, missed qualifying, then crashed again early in the race, taking out an innocent Palou. “I felt terrible,” VeeKay says. “It was the worst debut you could have had.” But he rebounded with a fifth-place finish in his next race, at Indianapolis, and ultimately earned Rookie of the Year honours. His win at Indy this season was the team’s first victory in five years. “We had a great strategy, and the car was incredible,” he says.

The Fab Four

Our twentysomethings are all title contenders although the old guard is digging deep to take the season to the final race. As we went to press, Palou had not fallen below third place in the 2021 ranking, while Chip Ganassi had three drivers in with a chance of championship success – Palou, Dixon and Marcus Ericsson… and there are no team orders

IndyCar isn’t the only series where young drivers are setting new standards. Across the globe, teenagers are flooding into junior series, and twentysomethings are finding their way to the front of grids at the highest levels. In F1, for example, Norris, Yuki Tsunoda, George Russell, Lance Stroll, Mick Schumacher, Charles Leclerc and Nikita Mazepin are all under 24. So is Max Verstappen, who already has six full seasons – and 17 wins – under his belt.

“The system is better today,” Mario Andretti explains. “These youngsters have the opportunity to get into serious equipment a lot sooner. Look at my career. I had to cheat to start at 19. These days, you’re almost a veteran at 19. Colton Herta, Pato O’Ward, those guys – they were champions in support series before they were even 20.”

“The role of the drivers has changed. These days they’re a cog”

Once upon a time, it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to begin racing when they were in their 20s. Pete Halsmer, who went on to a long and successful career in sports cars, was pushing 40 by the time he became a full-time professional. “I didn’t know what I couldn’t do, or I probably wouldn’t have started,” he says. “I like to say that you need a little bit of stupidity and a lot of persistence to be successful.”

Of course, age alone isn’t necessarily a barometer of experience. And it’s in experience, ironically, where today’s drivers outpace their counterparts of yesteryear.

“When I moved into Indycars, I had done less than 100 races in my entire life,” says Bryan Herta. “And I was ahead of the curve because you’d couldn’t even do your first lap in a race car until you were 18. Now, karting has become so professional that kids are advanced at seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 years old, and they’re getting into cars at 12, 13, 14. By the time they’re 18 or 19, they’re so much better developed as athletes. If they have the talent and the opportunity, they’re able to find success very quickly.”

At the same time, the role of the drivers has changed over the years. In days gone by, they were rugged individuals who were expected to carry cars on their broad shoulders. These days, they’re just a cog – granted, the most visible and important cog – in a complex machine with moving parts ranging from race strategists, tyre engineers and data-acquisition geeks to driver coaches, physios and nutritionists.

“There are better ways to prepare a driver these days,” says 29-year-old IndyCar winner Felix Rosenqvist, who started racing in Formula Renault when he was 15. “When ‘Uncle’ Dixon was growing up, it was more about feel and trusting yourself. Now you have a lot of engineers and simulators that can help you.”

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of simulators to the development of modern drivers. For the record, most of them don’t have access to the supercomputer-level sims used by manufacturers to develop and tune race cars, and the notion that race cars drive like video games is a myth. But there’s no question that off-the-shelf programs running on consoles and PCs have made racing more accessible – and comprehensible – to younger would-be Lewis Hamiltons.